The history of this page is a funny and accidental thing. As a bookseller, I often receive requests for long-lost childhood memories of books, and when I started this website back in 1995, I started receiving some cloudy email requests as well. I didn’t think much of it, but one which I “solved” caused me such amusement that I saved the message and later created the I Remember That Book! page.

I added other requests and quotes to that page, but I noticed two distinct kinds of requests: those for titles remembered, and those for which only a murky plot was remembered. The bookselling detective work for these requests is different, so I started the Stump the Bookseller page.

The Fame

Thanks to National Public Radio, our five minutes of fame was broadcast on January 25, 2003. Traffic on the site quadrupled in the weeks to follow. Thank you, Andy Bowers and the NPR team for the attention.

New Format

Our old manual methods of posting book stumpers grew wearisome, and the size of the site posed difficulties with certain web browsers. In February 2013, we opened a new blog format for the forum which makes commenting easier and faster, and which has a pretty awesome search capability. We still use a variation of keycodes for super-quick searching, and for easy identification of queries. There’s no longer a need for archiving, but you can focus your search by choosing Solved or Unsolved in the Categories column.

You can browse backwards into the archives by using the “older posts” button, you can the select the year and month using the drop-down box located on the right side of the screen or you can use the search box to search keywords.

I think people are trying to find the old archives, from before the move to this new blog format, so they can see what is still unsolved from the previous incarnation of this site, or access old solutions there that might help with newer queries. The archives available through the drop down you mention are for the new-format queries only. The old site no longer appears to be available at the link provided above–it redirects to this current site instead.